The Wisest Time of Day

July 9, 2010

By Anonymous, cambridge ma, MA

Image Credit: Andrew P., Muleshoe , TX

When I think of regrets- and I have many, one that always seems to haunt me is actually reoccurring. Every night of my life, inspired realizations and ideas go unrecorded. I'm certain it happens to everyone, but is rarely discussed. Like most mundane ebb and flows of the human mind, thoughts are often written off within seconds, disappearing into the invisible abyss of passing thoughts held for mere seconds at a time, usually impossible to ever retrieve again; these regretfully unrecorded thoughts are many. The thoughts I am referring to in particular are those that strike your mind at night in that elusive sliver of time before sleep paralyzes the body. Brilliant ideas, bursts of creativity, even splendid rhymes that you recognize as incredible and inspired by that near-hallucination that exhaustion induces are always revealed to the mind at this inopportune occasion. With all of your body's strength you attempt to rip yourself from the warmth your body has established pressed into the sheets, to no avail. You promise to yourself, in the last momets of lucidity, that you will in fact remember and record the new reflection sitting so brilliantly in your mind, as soon as you arise. But the great blanket of sleep snuffs your mind's gem from memory completely, those several hours of paralyzed nothingness too powerful for those delicious seconds (minutes if your lucky) of enlightenment. My inability to rouse myself from sleepy deliriousness just long enough to scribble a note for later, night after night, has always induced a sense of great remorse.

What, if anything, is a fitting way to acknowledge the loss of these forgotten thoughts? There are many things I would sacrifice in exchange for the ability to resurrect these lost insights- for everyone of them to tumble onto paper from my lazy morning pen, soft morning sunlight illuminating the clean white page as it is now. But this is impossible, memories from that time never truly survive past the dark hazy environment in which they are born, even if a few filaments resurface during the next day's ponderings. The only thing left to do is mourn the loss of these moments of perceived brilliance and wait for the night to once again play with consciousness before eyelids become too heavy too support, when thoughts aged by the hours of the day surpass the wisdom of mundane lunchtime conversations.

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